1000s or millions of billions of other critters and in fact each of us ourselves is actually a colony of a

10 thousand billion living amoebas all tightly knit together into a community but each an independent living creature that is born eats dies makes decisions communicates with its neighbors and ... because our colony of amoebas launched from the shores of each of our mothers' wombs (we were one of HER amoebas...we are a continously living journey of protoplasm more than 3 and a half billion generations long.. and all these living amoebas can eat explore turn food into itself communicate tell time build an entire replica of itself because each one is in fact an entire New York City full of

1000 billion nanorobots as many as there are bricks in all of New York City with its 100x100x100 bricks per building times 100 buildings per block times 200x 10 city blocks that takes a day to traverse

swimming in a soup of a

million billion molecular parts and a way to visualize a

billion is to slice a block of tofu into 10 slices and then turn it 90 degrees and slice that 10 times so you got a 100 slivers and then turn that over and slice that 10 times so you got a

1000 tiny cubes and now go find the corner of a large 3 story building and line those 1000 tiny tofu blocks one by one along the side of that building starting from the corner on the sidewalk till it's 30 feet along and then go back and slice up another

1000 tiny tofu blocklets and line them up along the other side of the building from the corner and now you gotta concentrate hard and use your imagination and visualize the floor of the building made up of a grid of a 1000x1000 tiny tofu blocks making up a

million of them and then go slice up another 1000 tofu blocklets and pile them up along the corner of the building like 1000 Lilliputian floors up 30 feet and now REALLY concentrate hard and visualize a 1000 of those million block grids all making up that building and by the way our brains what we think and feel and imagine with is made up of as many amoebas as

100 of these buildings of a billion amoebas all the while each of these amoebas is sending out arms of protoplasm to branch 10 times to point fingertips to a 1000 other amoebas across the city of brain to have these billions of simultaneous conversations. but what are these 100,000 billion nanorobots that make our amoebas dance anyway? they are proteins and enzymes and each is a sproingy network of

10,000 atoms of 6 different kinds linked in squaredances of electron orbitals and these nanorobot proteins can snap together and change shape and crawl across each other and make simple logic decisions (forming dense information processing networks...) interacting with dozens of each others and can even come together by the 100s to take each other apart and rebuild each other from scratch out of these atoms. go visit new york city and imagine each of those bricks you see is a flying crawling nanorobot and they all start moving around and swarming like clouds of billions of bees all rebuilding each other and reproducing an entire city in two weeks. and what the hell ARE these atoms anyway?

dozens of interacting electron orbitals each singing a different frequency and repelling each other but attracting each other in duets of dance to join with other atoms, to make atoms springy fuzzy sensitive boundaryless slightly unpredictable sparkles and are electrons and protons and neutrons the rock bottom core of stuff the universe is made of? well every time we look inside with our cathedrals of particle accelerator experiments like the Large Hadron Collider made of

over a billion precision crafted parts taking 10 years to build in a cavern that can swallow (a cathedral?) build like a ship in a bottle down a 150 foot deep shaft into the largest vaulted cavern on earth by 3000 scientists and engineers and students from over 40 different countries and cultures and languages and religions all learning to civilly criticise each other and come to agreements about the rock bottom nature of reality..

we keep finding another level of parts more messy than the previous level and that the universe isn't made out of stuff at all but maybe it's an infinitely complex mathematical game like a...